Eyes in the Sky Put Illegal Logging in Focus
Cambodia Daily | 1 December 2016
Cambodia’s illegal loggers will soon have a potentially powerful new
foe: a pair of NASA satellites with a keen interest in what they’re up
to.
Researchers at the University of Maryland in the U.S. say an innovative new system
that picks up signs of forest loss from space in near-real time—and
with finer precision than ever before—could be watching over Cambodia by
early next year.
Drawing on data from government
satellites that circle the globe every eight days, and running them
through its own algorithms, the university’s GLAD—Global Land Analysis
and Discovery—lab has been sending out alerts on deforestation almost as
it happens in the Congo, Indonesia and Peru since March. They have
since added Brazil, and Uganda is coming soon.
Last week, Matthew
Hansen, who helped develop the university’s system, said he hoped to
have the alerts up and running for Cambodia by spring, free of charge
and available to the public. Anyone with an internet connection will be
able to select a part of the country and sign up to get the alerts as
soon as they come out.
The university has teamed up with the World
Resources Institute to publish the alerts on the institute’s Global
Forest Watch website.
“We have been talking about near-real time
information for a while now at Global Forest Watch, but this is the
first time that we’ve felt like that is the reality,” said Mikaela
Weisse, a research analyst for the online forest monitor.
“We hope
the alerts will be used to catalyze rapid action in response to
deforestation. That could be park rangers conducting a patrol based on
the location of the alerts, journalists writing about concerning new
areas of deforestation, community groups documenting encroachment on
their lands, etc. The ultimate goal, of course, is reducing
deforestation.”
The university has been using data from NASA’s
Landsat 7 and 8 satellites for a few years already to put out annual
forest-change maps of the entire planet. Those maps show that since the
turn of the century, Cambodia has had one of the highest global rates of
forest loss.
The system, which will update subscribers on forest cover changes almost weekly, has its limits.
Satellites
need a clear view of the Earth and clouds can get in the way, a common
problem in the tropics. And, because the system measures tree cover,
selective logging that keeps the forest canopy largely intact can evade
detection.
Researchers hope park rangers and community groups will
follow up on the ground before loggers do their damage and leave, but
they’re likely to have a hard time finding the internet connections they
need to get the alerts in the remotest areas. Ms. Weisse said the team
was working on a mobile app, Forest Watchers, that will let users access
the alerts offline.
On the plus side, the resolution of the
images created by the system marks a vast improvement on most other
real-time alert systems, which produce images covering an area of 250
meters on each side of an area of focus. The GLAD alerts cover an area
of 30 meters per side. That’s roughly the difference between 10 football
fields and two basketball courts.
That’s still not fine enough to
pick up the loss of a few trees. But it can spot new logging roads
piercing through a thick forest, a common harbinger of more logging to
come.
Ms. Weisse said the system has so far had the most success
in Peru, where several government and NGO partners use the alerts
regularly.
“Those uses range from helping indigenous communities
monitor their lands, to writing stories about recent illegal
deforestation, to sending out monthly reports to regional government
agencies about detected forest changes,” she said.
In March,
Reuters reported that the images were used in Peru to spot illegal gold
miners clearing forest for their operations. The government stepped in
and shut the mine down.
Global Forest Watch hopes to have the rest
of the Amazon basin, Congo basin and insular Southeast Asia covered by
alerts in the next few months and to roll it out from there.
“Cambodia
is an interesting case because there is so much change going on in
forests, even in protected areas and intact forests,” Ms. Weisse said.
“I think the alerts, when ready, could help communities and NGOs
document cases of illegal or unwanted deforestation in near-real time.”
Of
course, the alerts will only help if there’s someone on the ground to
confirm that illegal or unwanted logging is actually taking place—and
ready to stop it.
“The idea is for users to take the information
to call out or slow illegal and unsustainable deforestation, but that
becomes much more difficult when the government is not supportive,” Ms.
Weisse said.
Jago Wadley, a senior campaigner for the U.K.-based
Environmental Investigation Agency, which has tracked Cambodia’s timber
trade, agreed.
“Its application will only be as useful as the use
enforcement officials put the alerts to. There is obviously the danger
that government [agencies] do not seek to build them into their formal
monitoring functions,” he said.
Mr. Wadley said some governments are likely to see the alerts as a breach of their national sovereignty.
That’s
a common refrain in Cambodia, where the government often accuses
critical NGOs of violating its sovereignty. It recently threatened to
kick the U.N.’s human rights team out of the country for suggesting that
the government’s exile of opposition leader Sam Rainsy was
unconstitutional. It threw environmental group Global Witness out of the
country for helping expose the government’s involvement in the
country’s illegal logging racket.
“They need to accept that the
technology will not go away, and that rather than being a threat it
presents very real and cost-effective enforcement capacity they should
take advantage of in the conduct of their duties,” Mr. Wadley said. “Not
to build this type of technology into government monitoring and
enforcement of forest sector activities would be a dereliction of duty.”
Marcus
Hardtke, who has been investigating the country’s timber trade for the
past two decades, said the government has also proven reluctant to
accept any research it either was not involved in or has not signed off
on.
“The government usually tries to ignore all data that has not
been generated and ‘approved’ by its agencies. This is, of course, only a
cheap excuse to ignore the obvious,” he said. “But an independent
monitoring system like this would certainly increase the pressure on
them to act.”
That is why the GLAD alerts need to be out of the
government’s hands and available to all, he added. The hope is that
what’s allowed to thrive in the dark might prove harder to ignore when
out in the open.
“Fighting against illegal logging in Cambodia
means, to at least 50 percent, fighting against government agencies
aiding and abetting environmental crime. In most cases, authorities are
well aware of what’s going on in their territories,” Mr. Hardtke said.
“But
rather than enforcing the law, they choose to tax illegal activities
for personal gain or black budgets. Established conservation NGOs cannot
be trusted with this either since they have a policy to gloss over
problems in their project areas,” he added. “Exposure and public
scrutiny work best in this kind of environment.”
Chheng Kim Sun,
who heads the Agriculture Ministry’s Forestry Administration, said he
was fully on board with the alerts and that he already received regular
alerts from NASA on forest fires.
“If that is a free application, it’s a great idea,” he said of the new alerts. “We would love to have it.”
Mr. Kim Sun said he had no concerns about having the alerts in the public domain.
“It’s nothing to hide,” he said. “Nothing to lie about to the people.”
But
the Agriculture Ministry has lost much of its jurisdiction over
Cambodia’s forests since it transferred control of its protected areas
over to the Ministry of Environment earlier this year. A spokesman for
the Environment Ministry could not be reached.
No comments:
Post a Comment